Chad Austin
Engineer at Facebook
Sunnyvale, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChad Austin is a seasoned engineer with 17 years building high-performance C++ systems, devops tooling, and cross-platform build infrastructure, currently based in Sunnyvale and working at Facebook. He combines low-level expertise—win32, x86 assembly and serialization—with higher-level skills in API design, Python, and product-minded engineering. Chad has a long history improving CI/CD, build systems, and portability across major open-source projects (notably contributions to Facebook's Thrift, Emscripten, and the QUIC implementation mvfst). His work often focuses on making complex native codebases reproducible and testable on diverse platforms, from single-core CI runners to Windows and FreeBSD. Prior roles include technical leadership at IMVU and platform engineering at Dropbox, reflecting a blend of research-backed HCI training and practical production experience. He’s a pragmatic problem-solver who tends to surface subtle cross-platform and encoding issues before they become outages.
17 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Masters of Science, Human Computer Interaction, Masters of Science, Human Computer Interaction at Iowa State UniversityPella High School
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (58)
github-ci10
javascript10
c-language10
maintenance10
python10
api-design10
freebsd10
testing10
windows10
hacking10
bash10
build-system10
data-serialization10
cmake10
hhvm10
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
facebook/sapling
Sep 2017 - Jan 2023
A Scalable, User-Friendly Source Control System.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:933 commits, 2 PRs, 2 pushes in 5 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Chad primarily contributed to the core functionality of the Sapling source control system. They implemented and enhanced features related to handling Thrift function histograms on Windows, automatically registering histograms for EdenService functions, making deleted default constructors explicit, adding a Thrift API for getting entry information, and renaming the Dtype to OsDtype for better serialization compatibility. They also removed a dead Thrift client method.
control-systemscalablesource-controluser-friendly
facebookincubator/katran
Sep 2019 - Nov 2022
A high performance layer 4 load balancer
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:51 commits in 3 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Chad primarily focused on improving the build and deployment processes for the `katran` repository. Their contributions include fixing build issues on Windows and single-core machines, upgrading the GitHub Actions setup to the latest versions, and improving the integration of test tools such as tpx. Furthermore, they worked on backgrounding prefetch operations and correcting path handling to enhance cross-platform compatibility, improving the project's overall build and test reliability. They also made several changes related to UTF-8 encoding and surrogate handling in logging.
performancemonitoringhigh-performanceload-balancerbalancer
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